UEMORI ARCHITECTS completed the “Sukagawa Community Center” in Fukushima. This is a 13,698 square meter (147,444 square foot) multi-functional complex with a library, museum, lecture hall, childcare center, and cafes. . The project was developed as part of a municipal reconstruction project with the purpose of reviving the heavily damaged city center after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. The five-story building constructed in cooperation with Ishimoto Construction Engineering Company is characterized by an open retreat, cantilever slabs and an activity-based floor plan.
The Sukagawa Community Center organizes a wide range of cultural and entertainment activities aimed at revitalizing community life and establishing a lasting and diverse relationship between the city and its citizens. Activity themes such as “improvement”, “play”, “creation”, “learning” and “meeting” divide the multifunctional building into different activity areas, while the traditional library categories are reclassified to create a new system. “Together with the library stuff, we edited about 250,000 books from the beginning to become a new category of original Sukagawa City,” Hiroyuki Unemori, founder of UNEMORI ARCHITECTS, told DesignBoom in a zoom interview.
UNEMORI ARCHITECTS and Ishimoto Construction and Engineering Co., Ltd. developed the Sukagawa Community Center as a complex structural system. The building is designed as an interlocking structure based on different floor slabs, which are divided into small parts and staggered to form a gradual retreat on the site facing the historical main street. The interior is characterized by an open floor plan and offset floor levels, some of which seem to float freely in the cavity in the center. This intricate structural system is realized by a giant steel frame structure, which is placed on the third and fourth floors.
Designboom interviewed Hiroyuki Unemori, the founder of UNEMORI ARCHITECTS, to discuss the design of community buildings after a huge natural disaster, and how they reorganized the entire Japanese library system to create something unique for Sukagawa City. Read the full interview below.
Designboom (DB): The Sukagawa Community Center was developed after the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. How does the new design deal with future natural disasters?
UEMORI ARCHITECTS (UA): The Sukagawa Community Center is a project after the Great East Japan Earthquake, which is why we try to deal with it in a hard and soft way. For the hard design, we stacked a series of floor slabs and moved them to the side to create an external terrace. This allows us to evacuate the building through external terraces and stairs in the event of a disaster. In addition, under the current coronavirus situation, not only can you pass through the terrace, but you can also ventilate the room better through large windows. As for the soft design, this building has become a base for generations. From children to the elderly, they can visit and work in this building every day. By doing this, you can see the faces of citizens and understand the buildings. This daily use can effectively play the role of evacuation and mutual assistance in the event of a disaster.
DB: If so, what are the needs and challenges of designing a building to revitalize the destroyed Sukagawa city center?
UA: After the earthquake, the city became empty and most people walking around disappeared. Therefore, by creating many terraces, we can directly see people from the city, and I want to encourage the city through the appearance of the people working in this building. I also want to build a building that allows people to walk around the city and connect with the city. Suka River is a city with many slopes, and there is a height difference of about 2.5 meters between the east and the west of the site. In order to connect the height difference, the whole floor of the first floor is made into a slope so that people can pass through the building and connect to the city. However, due to safety and other reasons, it is difficult to implement such terraces and sloping floors in public facilities in Japan. But we successfully realized this project through a lot of discussions with relevant people.
DB: What is the appeal of the public? How did you incorporate it into the design concept? What activities are included in the floor plan of a multi-purpose building?
UA: From the beginning of the design to the completion of the building, about 35 public seminars were held and 1,400 opinions were put forward. There are various requirements, some of which are a bit crazy, such as a hot spring or a planetarium. However, when we heard these opinions, many of them crossed over their functions, such as wanting to teach food, or educating in the form of cooking classes. If there are children’s playgrounds and libraries nearby, it would be great. Perhaps after the earthquake, we realized that there was a potential need for citizens to connect with someone. After that seminar, we reconsidered a complex facility with only different functions to create a new architecture with integrated functions. This building is mainly a multifunctional library complex and a community center that provides childcare support. Therefore, we tried to break it down into activities and reclassify them into nine topics. The books are arranged according to each topic. The whole building is a library, forming a comprehensive building and an activity place. For example, we arranged books about making things near the crafting room. In addition, cooking books are placed near the cooking studio, and picture books and other books are placed in the indoor playground. In this way, even if children are not interested in books, they will still encounter these books. The opposite can also happen; people who come to fetch books can encounter these activities.
Each floor, each section, contains the theme of each category. For example, one is called “raise” and the other is called “create”, and each slab is stacked and moved on one side. Then we plan to connect the blocks with gentle slopes and stairs so that people can encounter various spaces, books and activities, just like walking in the city. In addition to the high and low ceilings, there is an intermediate space between the windows called the inner terrace, which is like an “engawa”, so the building has various outdoor, indoor and intermediate spaces. Our goal is to create a building that truly allows everyone to stay by creating various types of spaces.
UA: The boards of the building are not aligned, so the pillars cannot be passed through. This is why it is necessary to move the position of the pillar up and down. In addition, I don’t want to put a pillar on the floor of the first floor because I want the first floor to feel like a street. Therefore, a huge structure with truss beams was created on a part of the third and fourth floors (middle layer), and then the lower cantilevered layer was suspended from there to support the pillars of the upper layer. This huge building is about two meters high and is equipped with air conditioning and other equipment. Through the cross-sectional treatment of the equipment space, there is almost no need for the machine room on each floor, which allows the opening to be operated in all directions. In addition, this huge structure acts as a sound-absorbing layer with sound-absorbing materials inside to prevent the lively sound of the lower entrance from reaching the quiet gallery and library space on the upper level. At the same time, a gradual sound environment is realized in the large studio space. This huge building can also be used as a smoke pool space in the event of a fire, where we plan to let collective smoke be exhausted through the smoke exhaust window.
DB: You can see through the giant structure that wraps the grid that it is really good-the equipment is not hidden.
UA: This is because we want the public to understand how the building is composed, so we tried to expose this truss. Huge structures can also be used as elements for hanging objects, such as a net-like play space above an indoor playground. It has many functions, not only structure, but also equipment, environment and fire protection.
The population of Sukagawa City is approximately 77,000. After its completion, 700,000 people-including residents and tourists-came to the city within a year. In addition, the most important point is that, in fact, this project was not only completed by UNEMORI, but also a joint venture between an established construction company and an architect in his 30s. Generally speaking, in Japan, it is really difficult to challenge such a large public building, but the goal of the Sukagawa government is to obtain fresh ideas by combining creativity and experience. Many projects after the disaster in eastern Japan were just to restore the current situation; this project tried to do this through creative thinking. Image by kai nakamura
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